A quick note with regard to centering. When I share tips, resources or information with you it’s to offer you something you can plug into your life; these resources often are things I use to help myself through the pain of estrangement, so will be from my experience and will center me when I share how I’m using them. This post is that.
For so many of us parents whose children have estranged from us, it’s a time of famine of relationship and it’s extraordinarily important for us to nourish our hearts and souls during this time. Many of the things you read over all of this internet are good things to be doing - if you can.
This depth of sadness accompanied by misunderstanding can render us paralytic in many ways. In decisions. In actions. In choosing our own health over everything else. I’ve been in that spot enough times it hurts me for my past self.
I am fond of reparenting as part of my healing because my own family of origin taught me so many damaging rules, beliefs and values. All of those were compounded by settling for a violent domestic abuser as a spouse as a 17 going on 18 year old who thought she was heading toward building a family and equitable relationship. What I needed at that age was mentoring from healthy, solid, experienced women and I didn’t have any in my life.
So during this famine of relationship with my children I am choosing many things but two of the most impactful are:
1- Doing what I will do
2- Learning to reparent the younger me in order to build a better, more mature older me
Doing what I will do
This has transformed me several times over. It’s doing the thing I will do over doing the thing I should, or said I would, or am supposed to, or am demanded of to do.
What does doing what I will do look like?
During my dark decade, an example of a thing I would do was following through on applying for aid (in my case it started out as disability and medicaid insurance and is now early retirement with medicaid as my insurance along with working part time). Another thing I would do was find mental health care.
The level of depression I was drowning in during that decade can be described as non suicidal but ambivalent to whether I lived or not. This is something my children may not know and are not able to hear in this moment in our lives. There are plenty of examples during those years of me not doing things I said I would do. Things I had no capacity to fight for myself over that Daughter began framing as me lying about. One example is that Daughter decided I needed mental health medication. No assessment, no diagnosis, no mental health expertise. It became part of the shifting mandates to me on her part that started out by her deciding we needed family meetings for me to report on applying for jobs; before I had any solution to the excruciating pain and immobility of my body; that part for some reason was exclusively my failed mental health according to Daughter. So, on my part, I didn’t stand up for myself externally in most any way and let all of my children think the things they were thinking, influenced by Daughter’s opinion of me. And we are all estrained (yes, meant to write that because it applies), we are an estrained family.
Today, I’m going on three years post op for my knee and hip replacements. My surgeon says every time he sees me he can’t believe I was walking at all with the damage to my hip. He had to take more bone than he expected during that surgery. I have 90% less pain in my body than I had for ten straight years so doing what I will do is a combination of my mind and body becoming acquainted with one another again as I grow into an older, wiser, better person.
I’m in equine assisted trauma therapy. Out of pocket, because Alabama Medicaid’s mental health care is abysmal. That means I don’t go as often as I could if I could use insurance. This type of therapy is interesting because horses reflect and are pretty amazing indicators of a human’s interior state vs their external state. I’m just starting out but it’s kind of wonderful to be pulled out of my head and into the moment while working with this amazing animal.
For you, doing what you will do will certainly look different and it may take some time to break away from shoulding on yourself to find the thing you will do. It’s probably going to surprise you, too. My doing what I will do ranges from getting up the motivation for walking a distance as I continue to build body strength to deciding to go to a local gathering to meet people like I did for this past thanksgiving (something I have turned away from countless times while in the dark decade). Both are absolutely joy filled experiences for me. And. I give myself grace when I don’t do them…but I will say the more I do the more I do. Iykyk.
Learning to reparent the younger me is a bit more of a challenge while also pretty damned amazing. For me it started with simply not shitting on myself internally on a daily basis and evolved to me learning to sit in a moment, assess the thing that made me want act out or be immature along with the emotions it raised. Then I talk my young self through it in a way that gives space for young me to understand we are safe and can figure out a solution to almost anything. Funnily enough it also includes taking my own advice sometimes.
I think there’s an IFS (internal family systems) aspect to learning to reparent ourselves. I love the idea of IFS and will eventually use it, I’m only surface familiar with the concept but it looks great.
Reparenting a younger you will help you choose better. In almost everything. These two things are the actions of love you can take for yourself that will show up as love for your children whether they see it eventually or not. Because that’s the hard part of life often, the growing while going through it.
Thanks for reading, talk to you soon.